Need some help with RAID

[kdawgisawesome]

Hey! I am brand new to this RAID Stuff I just got my first server a Dell R730 and I used a few drives that I had laying around the drives that are currently in the server are 

4 x 465.25 GB HDD
2 x 1862.50 GB HDD 

And when I quickly setup this server I just setup a RAID 5 array and added all the drives into the array. But I am noticing that the total usable space on the array is not adding up and when I expand one of my 2TB drives it says: Used RAID Disk Space 465.25GB

And my main question was what is the best configuration to setup the drives and get as much USABLE storage as I can. But also have the peace of mind of expanding all my drives to like IRON WOLF drives later on and expanding some drives to like 12TB drives.

[Dutch_Master]

RAID uses the smallest capacity drive as base, any extra capacity on larger drives is essentially wasted.

 

For your use case, do the following:

• delete your current RAID
• create a RAID0 with 4x 500GB drives (md0)
• create RAID5 with md0 and 2x 2TB drives (md1)

This maximises your storage to 4TB and you have one drive redundancy.